of 9/11 had been slowly maturing for considerable time. It’s there in the ideas of Carl Schmitt, from whom Agamben borrows his terms. Carl Schmitt says what comes after a state of exception is a state of emergency. And the emergency is the return to the norm, and equally — of course Walter Benjamin writes about this, too — there’s this move from exception to emergency, exception to emergency — so, actually, states of exception are not that exceptional in the broad sweep of history.
That was one of the main issues I really wanted to start bringing out: this idea that actually clinging to this politics of exceptionalism represented a failure of the political imaginary, a failure in our ways of thinking about 9/11 historically. And also, tied to that is the question, how did this discourse of exceptionalism — “the world begins with 9/11,” “Ground Zero is Year Zero,” “all history projects forward from this moment” — how did that particular memorialization of the event lend itself to the discourse of war?
If we see the response to 9/11 as actually something that’s not exceptional but altogether normalized, we begin to enter into a new political discussion. And this discussion centers on the realization that none of us was actually surprised by the intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan — there was nothing exceptional to it. The way that Western Liberal societies — and that’s Liberal with a big L — the way we deal with violence is through violence and retribution. Such is the altogether normal way of dealing with problems which exceed our limits of expectation. So, in other words, our response to 9/11 wasn’t in any way exceptional. It was, actually, from the perspective of our political history, “business as usual.”
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